3D Acceleration on OS4 ( SDL and MESA )

[ronybeck]

Forgive me if this is an old topic but I am curious to know what sort of talk there has been from Hyperion about support for Hardware 3D cards.  This is important because given that Amiga has SDL support and will have Mesa Support it makes it Ideal to port some 3D games from linux.  How ever, Mesa by default will use software 3d rendering which is not so nice.

I hear that OS4 will support NVida and ATI cards but to what level of functionality.  Will it go beyond 2D?

Porting 3D games from Linux is not so unrealistic because the SDL API allows a games programer to use fairly generic code with out too much need to use OS specific API's and Libraries.  For example, UT2k3 was ported from Linux to MacOS because it used OpenGl and SDL ( on the linux version ) which is common on most platforms, and with realtive ease.

SDL is good because it deals with fast access to the GFX card, sound, threading and input such as Joysticks and mice with out the need to code specifically for the OS.  Does any one else see the possibilities of where I am going with this?

[csirac_]

Actually, although I've only used the input/2d side of the SDL, it didnt' really seem to support much in the way of 3D except in setting up OpenGL.

I think any commerical game that used the SDL would only use it for input/2d parts (menus, etc.) and then the 3D part would be any implimentation of OpenGL. I think the really hard part, though, would be in getting the source for those Linux games ;-)

Loki doesn't operate any more do they? Who is porting what to Linux these days? Linux is my only OS on my PC, but I'm way out of the loop when it comes to games

- Paul

[downix]

IIRC SDL does not interact with the video card directly at all, it simply redirects to the systems native drivers, or to the CPU when no hw accelerated drivers are availible.

MESA is the same way, no built-in drivers included, just wrappers to the system drivers.  No hw accelerated drivers, you get software-rendering.

What will AOS4 support for hw accelerated drivers, not a clue.

[KennyR]

According to rumour, OS4 will have a 3D acceleration graphics system called Nova, the successor to Warp3D. MiniGL or something similar will probably run on top of this. No doubt it won't be hard to get SDL and MESA wrapped to Nova. The hard part will be the drivers...

btw. SDL is a great wrapper, but it's horribly slow and bloated and this makes its applications limited, even on G3s and G4s. I could probably say the same for MESA, in fact.

[ronybeck]

IIRC SDL does not interact with the video card directly at all

This is not always true.  SDL issues Register level intructrions to Vodoo and some matrox cards I believe.  John Hall wrote a little bit about this In his book "Programing Linux Games" which you used to be able to download the PDF for at no charge.

Loki is gone but others are writing Linux games.  Never Winter Nights is a good example.  Savage is the next big release for Linux followed by Doom3

But look beyond the commercial shops. There are many great Open Source games that would work nicely on an OS4 amiga.

it didnt' really seem to support much in the way of 3D except in setting up OpenGL.

Yes!   It doesn't do anything in the way of 3D but it does set up the display for redndering OpenGL.  This is good because you don't need to write OS specific code to open a window with a frame buffer then get openGL to use it.  SDL does this all for you with few lines of generic code.